What a nightmare. I really should start migrating from GMail to something else (or at least use my own domain in front of it).
1. (Optional) Register a domain (So if you need to migrate in the future, you don't need to change your email address!)
2. Sign up for paid service somewhere else. Paid email services are extremely cheap, and worth it to have a phone number where you can call a real human person.
* If you wish to continue using the Gmail interface, skip step 3 *
3. Forward Gmail to the new account.
4. As you see messages you want coming to your Gmail account, switch them to your new account.
5. (Optional) If you really like the Gmail interface, use IMAP/SMTP to check your email in Gmail, even though it's really coming from/to your external account!
It's really easy to get away from GMail, and definitely worth it.
1. If your registrar account is compromised, someone can redirect your mail at will.
2. If your payment lapses you might lose the entire domain.
3. If you die, it’s unlikely your family will understand how to maintain the system.
4. Some systems will classify your email as spam even with the right MX configuration (DMARC,DKIM etc)
I think the right choice is having a paid relationship with a mail provider that’s been in the business a long time, and use their domain.
As for 3, well, I really don't care in the least what happens after I die. I won't be around anymore.
I can't really speak about how much of a problem 4 is, because it's never happened to me. I suspect the people who get their email classified as spam while using a large email provider actually are doing something wrong.
I know it happens to me, because I have to verbally follow-up sometimes.
The only way you would know if #4 doesn't happen to you, is if you're doing something wrong, like trying to track when people open the email.
I did it last week. I signed up for Fastmail, followed their excellent documentation, and now only have a mandatory (new) Google account for a few apps in the Play Store that are not available anywhere else (but nothing paid). If I lose access to my Google account, I lose nothing.
My Fastmail migration basically went like this:
* Clean up mailbox, truncate mailing list folders.
* Copy mail to Fastmail using their importer.
* Change domain settings at your domain host (changing MX-records and a bunch of others); mail now goes to Fastmail.
* Set up mail and calendars in Thunderbird on Ubuntu and K-9 Mail on GrapheneOS.
After migrating an account, they know it, as they can scan your mail. Slowly, each red mark on your dashboard gets replaced with a green mark.
As soon as anyone besides Gmail can successfully do spam filtering, I'm stuck with them.
(Why do I get so much spam? Because I've been using the same email address, never hiding it at all even on Usenet, for 25 years.)
I have three email accounts outside of gmail that are forwarding to gmail so I can have a favicon counter. Those email accounts maintain their own copies of the emails. If gmail were to lock me out I would lose my favicon counter. I would need to get a new phone number to create a new account and set up the fowards to the new address.
Why do I insist on this convoluted setup? My previous email client was a firefox addon that showed me that counter and it made me read my emails. Every email account that doesn't follow this set up that I have has lots of unread emails.
I have a thunderbird instance with 140 unread emails open right now. I have 0 on gmail.